Believing and Seeing: The Art of Gothic Cathedrals
by Roland Recht translated by Mary Whittall
University of Chicago Press, 2008 Paper: 978-0-226-70607-8 | Cloth: 978-0-226-70606-1 Library of Congress Classification N6310.R4313 2008 Dewey Decimal Classification 709.022
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Developments in medieval science that elevated sight above the other senses found religious expression in the Christian emphasis on miracles, relics, and elaborate structures. In his incisive survey of Gothic art and architecture, Roland Recht argues that this preoccupation with vision as a key to religious knowledge profoundly affected a broad range of late medieval works.
In addition to the great cathedrals of France, Recht explores key religious buildings throughout Europe to reveal how their grand designs supported this profusion of images that made visible the signs of scripture. Metalworkers, for example, fashioned intricate monstrances and reliquaries for the presentation of sacred articles, and technical advances in stained glass production allowed for more expressive renderings of holy objects. Sculptors, meanwhile, created increasingly naturalistic works and painters used multihued palettes to enhance their subjects’ lifelike qualities. Reimagining these works as a link between devotional practices in the late Middle Ages and contemporaneous theories that deemed vision the basis of empirical truth, Recht provides students and scholars with a new and powerful lens through which to view Gothic art and architecture.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Roland Recht is professor of art history at the University of Strasbourg. Mary Whittall (1937-2005) translated many books from French and German, including several for the University of Chicago Press.
REVIEWS
“A personal and new synthesis, bringing together a deep knowledge of historiography and a strong theoretical reflection based on empirical scholarship.”
— Le Monde
“A masterly, and very personal, analysis of gothic art.”
— L’Histoire on the French edition
“This interpretation of gothic art, which deals not only with architecture, but also with spirituality and theology, is extraordinarily rich.”
— L'Express
“Recht seeks to understand the dual evolution of changing theological positions—including such factors as private devotion and even religious taste—and modes of representation. Central to his idea is that the notions of seeing, in theological and also lay understandings, coincided with changes in representation; that ‘believing and seeing,’ as the title declares, are part of the same cultural system and, moreover, contingent on one another for the success of representation. . . . Recht’s book is especially at its most engaging when it opens up the treatment of images to suggest that ways of seeing, believing, and making constitute all together ‘l’art des cathedrales.’”
— Art Bulletin, on the French edition
"An ambitious, broad-ranging study of the role and function of the image within the medieval church. Roland Recht, here in a translation by Mary Whitehall, brings together two subjects that are usually studied separately, architecture and sacred images, and he proposes that the latter cannot be understood or experienced without the former, in both spatial and liturgical terms. . . . Recht unfolds his analysis of the complex and multiple functions of medieval church sculpture within the many-sided prism of ambient space, ritual and liturgy and doctrine, enabling viewers who inhabit a different visual and spiritual world to recreate some part of the role of the image for the medieval viewer. . . .
This volume is of fundamental importance to the study of medieval art, and should become part of the intellectual apparatus of all who concern themselves with the religious image."
— Caroline Bruzelius, Times Higher Education
"Readers will be rewarded by Recht's brilliant analysis of Gothic architectural polychromy, stained glass, and stone sculpture, and should find the unity of Recht's 'vision' of the Gothic ultimately convincing."
— Choice
"An intriguing study of Gothic accompanied by investigation of many critical questions in the discipline, written by an observant and thoughtful scholar."
— Charlotte A. Stanford, Bryn Mawr Classical Review
"What has often been reduced to pious simplicity . . . is now rediscovered as vibrant, sophisticated, and flexibly intellectual. Whatever viewpoint one brings to Gothic architecture, one's understanding of medieval art will be challenged and enhanced by Recht's scholarly, measured panorama."
— Matthew Alderman, First Things
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Note on the Translation
Introduction
Part I
From Romanticized Mechanics to the Cathedral of Light
1. Gothic Architecture: Technology and Symbolism
The Gothic System: “Romanticized Mechanics”?
Symbolical Interpretations and Two World Wars
2. Ornament, Style, and Space
The First and Second Viennese Schools
August Schmarsow: Art as a System
The Question of Style, or, The Search for Unity
Space and the Picture as Plane
Part II
An Introduction to the Art of Cathedrals
3. The Seen and the Unseen
Seeing the Host: St. Francis and the Testimony of One’s Own Eyes
Seeing Mysteries
The Physics and Metaphysics of Seeing
4. Architecture and the “Connoisseurs”
Architectural Relics and Innovations
The Enhancement of the Visual
Architectural Iconology and the Architect’s Role
Chartres and Bourges: “Classical” or “Gothic”?
The French Model: Canterbury, Cologne, and Prague
Architecture, Color, and Glass
5. The Carved Image and Its Functions
The Devotional Image
The Carved Image and the Liturgy
The Cathedral as a Theater of Memory
Expression, Color, and Dress
6. Models, Transmission of Forms and Types, and Working Methods
A New Model: The Royal Portrait
The Transmission of Forms and Types
Working Method
The Display and Sale of Art
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Suggested Reading
Index
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
Believing and Seeing: The Art of Gothic Cathedrals
by Roland Recht translated by Mary Whittall
University of Chicago Press, 2008 Paper: 978-0-226-70607-8 Cloth: 978-0-226-70606-1
Developments in medieval science that elevated sight above the other senses found religious expression in the Christian emphasis on miracles, relics, and elaborate structures. In his incisive survey of Gothic art and architecture, Roland Recht argues that this preoccupation with vision as a key to religious knowledge profoundly affected a broad range of late medieval works.
In addition to the great cathedrals of France, Recht explores key religious buildings throughout Europe to reveal how their grand designs supported this profusion of images that made visible the signs of scripture. Metalworkers, for example, fashioned intricate monstrances and reliquaries for the presentation of sacred articles, and technical advances in stained glass production allowed for more expressive renderings of holy objects. Sculptors, meanwhile, created increasingly naturalistic works and painters used multihued palettes to enhance their subjects’ lifelike qualities. Reimagining these works as a link between devotional practices in the late Middle Ages and contemporaneous theories that deemed vision the basis of empirical truth, Recht provides students and scholars with a new and powerful lens through which to view Gothic art and architecture.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Roland Recht is professor of art history at the University of Strasbourg. Mary Whittall (1937-2005) translated many books from French and German, including several for the University of Chicago Press.
REVIEWS
“A personal and new synthesis, bringing together a deep knowledge of historiography and a strong theoretical reflection based on empirical scholarship.”
— Le Monde
“A masterly, and very personal, analysis of gothic art.”
— L’Histoire on the French edition
“This interpretation of gothic art, which deals not only with architecture, but also with spirituality and theology, is extraordinarily rich.”
— L'Express
“Recht seeks to understand the dual evolution of changing theological positions—including such factors as private devotion and even religious taste—and modes of representation. Central to his idea is that the notions of seeing, in theological and also lay understandings, coincided with changes in representation; that ‘believing and seeing,’ as the title declares, are part of the same cultural system and, moreover, contingent on one another for the success of representation. . . . Recht’s book is especially at its most engaging when it opens up the treatment of images to suggest that ways of seeing, believing, and making constitute all together ‘l’art des cathedrales.’”
— Art Bulletin, on the French edition
"An ambitious, broad-ranging study of the role and function of the image within the medieval church. Roland Recht, here in a translation by Mary Whitehall, brings together two subjects that are usually studied separately, architecture and sacred images, and he proposes that the latter cannot be understood or experienced without the former, in both spatial and liturgical terms. . . . Recht unfolds his analysis of the complex and multiple functions of medieval church sculpture within the many-sided prism of ambient space, ritual and liturgy and doctrine, enabling viewers who inhabit a different visual and spiritual world to recreate some part of the role of the image for the medieval viewer. . . .
This volume is of fundamental importance to the study of medieval art, and should become part of the intellectual apparatus of all who concern themselves with the religious image."
— Caroline Bruzelius, Times Higher Education
"Readers will be rewarded by Recht's brilliant analysis of Gothic architectural polychromy, stained glass, and stone sculpture, and should find the unity of Recht's 'vision' of the Gothic ultimately convincing."
— Choice
"An intriguing study of Gothic accompanied by investigation of many critical questions in the discipline, written by an observant and thoughtful scholar."
— Charlotte A. Stanford, Bryn Mawr Classical Review
"What has often been reduced to pious simplicity . . . is now rediscovered as vibrant, sophisticated, and flexibly intellectual. Whatever viewpoint one brings to Gothic architecture, one's understanding of medieval art will be challenged and enhanced by Recht's scholarly, measured panorama."
— Matthew Alderman, First Things
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Note on the Translation
Introduction
Part I
From Romanticized Mechanics to the Cathedral of Light
1. Gothic Architecture: Technology and Symbolism
The Gothic System: “Romanticized Mechanics”?
Symbolical Interpretations and Two World Wars
2. Ornament, Style, and Space
The First and Second Viennese Schools
August Schmarsow: Art as a System
The Question of Style, or, The Search for Unity
Space and the Picture as Plane
Part II
An Introduction to the Art of Cathedrals
3. The Seen and the Unseen
Seeing the Host: St. Francis and the Testimony of One’s Own Eyes
Seeing Mysteries
The Physics and Metaphysics of Seeing
4. Architecture and the “Connoisseurs”
Architectural Relics and Innovations
The Enhancement of the Visual
Architectural Iconology and the Architect’s Role
Chartres and Bourges: “Classical” or “Gothic”?
The French Model: Canterbury, Cologne, and Prague
Architecture, Color, and Glass
5. The Carved Image and Its Functions
The Devotional Image
The Carved Image and the Liturgy
The Cathedral as a Theater of Memory
Expression, Color, and Dress
6. Models, Transmission of Forms and Types, and Working Methods
A New Model: The Royal Portrait
The Transmission of Forms and Types
Working Method
The Display and Sale of Art
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Suggested Reading
Index
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE